Poetry as Spiritual Practice: On Loving Our Past Selves

Finding healing through the ritual of poetry

TW: Religious trauma, extremism, spiritual abuse, bullying, metaphor about death

Poetry found me early and held me up through some dark times of spiritual abuse and extremism. First, I found solace as a bullied middle schooler at a Christian school, reading angry psalms where the poets asked God, “WTF? Why do people hellbent on cruelty always seem to win?”

Then, in high school, I found Anne Bradstreet.

I recently wrote a poem about that experience:

The sun was bright, but welcoming

The sky was blue

The trees enclosed me like a hug

The wind picked up my hair and ruffled my floral sundress

I held open my homeschooling literature textbook

I read poetry written by a woman long ago

/

Anne Bradstreet was a religious fanatic like me

But she adored nature

And wrote a long poem about it

She felt the dissonance of seeing the divine in creation

While hearing her community’s call to not love anything too much

/

But I knew what I felt

I felt like myself out there in nature

I was content

I was safe

And maybe Anne was too

/

Her conflicted poems

And the bright light of Phoebus

Lit my way to safety

To community

To my true self,

Made to wander and wonder

As a fundamentalist teenager, I adored Anne Bradstreet’s Puritan poems, and “Contemplations,” which is the poem I was engaging with above, still holds a special, though complex, place in my heart. (If you’d like to read “Contemplations,” you can do so here, at the Poetry Foundation.)

To this day, I write poetry a lot.

Recently, I wrote a poem that speaks to my complex relationship with my past self—that dear, sweet fundamentalist child with an extremist worldview. How can I love her, when in some ways, she doesn’t exist anymore? When that version of me was used as a weapon?

The answer came to me with the idea of death and resurrection, which I guess makes sense, since I still consider myself a Christian.

Evangelical me died,

Crushed by fundamentalism.

/

But she didn’t die in vain.

/

She died fighting for me, 

For my safety, 

For the safety of her loved ones,

For the truth.

She died in bravery.

She was crushed unjustly, but she was raised up.

/

She is me, and I am her. 

If I believe that divine Love holds us up (to paraphrase a quotation attributed to Julian of Norwich), I love all of my selves—past, present, future. Indeed, I love ALL selves and am in some way connected to them. It’s this truth that is at the bedrock of my religion and my spiritual practice.¹

As far as religion, I began my journey with the Creator in Christianity, and while I remain there, I draw from a lot of spiritual (especially nature-based) streams—notably witchcraft, which I am writing a book about. While I ultimately understand the divine to be Jesus, my picture of God is very expansive. For example, Michael Caine, a UCC pastor, once described God this way, and I really resonated with it: “Father, Son, Holy Spirit—Mother of Us All.” I may be wrong about the divine, and I know I don’t have the full picture, but I am committed to rooting my life in love, in a willingness to learn/change my mind and to have wonder. And poetry, for me, is a huge part of that practice.

And, so I guess what I’m saying is, may poetry be to you, readers, what it has been to me and so many others: a source of love, hope, expression, wonder, belonging, and self-compassion—for all of your past, present, and future selves.

P. S. Readers, in what way(s) has poetry been to you a source of love, hope, expression, wonder, belonging, or self-compassion? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

In Wonder,

Kandi Zeller (she/her)

Book Me for an Editing Project

Website: KandiZeller.com

Instagram: @Kandi.Zeller

1. When I describe or experience any tool/practices as spiritual, I want to acknowledge that that is not everyone’s experience. Any practice/tool I share is meant for all, regardless of spiritual label (or lack of label) or whether you experience these tools as spiritual or as some other adjective(s). Labels, while helpful in describing our experiences, are ultimately insufficient, so I want to hold space for that tension here.